sp3ctr4l

A true model citizen.

Don't forget secured cards, which require an upfront deposit, and cards with regular monthly or annual fees, simply for having them, regardless of whether you use them or not.

Thats the kind of credit cards you get offered if you are bad with credit cards (cough most Americans are cough thats kinda the whole business model cough), or, if someone steals your identity and you either don't have enough time or money or otherwise can't sufficiently prove to credit reporting agencies / banks that that is what happened.

Debit cards typically have PIN numbers.

I know these can be defeated in various ways, but its not usually as simple as, just steal someone's card.

Also, you can just go to your bank or credit union, call them, report online or w/e: Hey, my card got stolen, these txns are fraud.

Might not be as streamlined or as fast as a payment challenge with a credit card, but its not that much worse.

If you're gonna pick a cryptocurrency, go with the one that actually keeps your identity encrypted, and is intentionally designed to make it unfeasible to farm with a huge crypto mining operation:

Monero.

Didn't he already like, steal a bunch of credit cards by breaking into cars?

"Mmm, munch, mmm, I love this popcorn!"

Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.

Person with degree in Econ here:

Ah, yep. This is correct.

Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic 'schools of thought' pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.

That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of 'economics' the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.

There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you'll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.

Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work... are problematic.

Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic 'schools', such as MMT.

What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems... whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.

And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / 'scientist'.

(I always found the job description of 'data scientisr' to be largely a misnomer, we're basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is 'science'? like we are... discovering new truths about the world????)

I'd say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.

Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.

Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.

Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist's toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.

How could they plan this without Starbucks and Microsoft Teams?!

Imagine the scale of the HR department alone.

I realize this is a joke, and it did elicit a good chuckle from me, but I have two technical sort of nit picks / factoids.

As I understand these things:

To the vast majority of Catholics, the Pope is not literally a god-king, who becomes basically a minor god oh his physical death, or just literally is onenof the greater gods made incarate... the Pope is God's chosen representative on Earth, sort of like a more formalized version of many Old Testament prophets, who also leads God's church.

Also... the Amish, the Mennonites... they very much do have as part of their culture, which very much revolves around religion... that you more or less are a expected to, and by this cement that you are a good person of faith and character, that you help others by participating, often regularly, in work-gangs, to stand up at least the basics of barn or house, in what is a shockingly short amount of time, and done in a very high quality manner, with less technologically advanced tools than what is normal for others.

Seriously, if you've never seen this, go look up something like Amish Barn Raising on youtube.

They start with basically just raw materials, assemble large parts of the framing, stand em up with just ropes, set up and join the whole thing, get the outer walls and roof on and doors on, in under a a single work day.

Depending on how exactly you draw the line on 'slavery'... maybe? Kinda?

For the Great Pyramid, the current approximate consenus is that it was basically a corvee labor system for a large amount of the population of Egypt.

Basically, when the farmers were all in their off season, they'd be drafted for a number of months a year to aid construction as general laborers.

They were housed, fed, and paid for this, by the state/royal coffers.

They were paid in material goods like foodstuffs, as currency in the way we think of it wasn't really a thing at the time.

And yes, they absolutely did have divisions of labor, they had basically nobility or psuedo nobilility people who could largely read and write as trained architects and engineers and mathematicians and record keepers and accountants, and had a whole slew of the craftsmen / stone mason class below them.

So... it is forced labor, you couldn't really opt out, but you would be compensated.

Egypt did have roughly chattel slaves at the time, they probably participated as well, but they are estimated to be about 10% of the total population of Egypt at the time.

(Compare this to say, 1st century AD/CE Rome, where I think the estimate is more like roughly 20-30% being slaves)

There is also the religious component: It is likely that many of the drafted laborers viewed this as a privilege or sacred duty to construct the tomb of their living god-king, who they would have believed became essentially immortal, his spirit would be preserved for eternity, as a consequence of their work.

So maybe think of it as an extremely intensive mission trip to go build shelters for the needy, as a rough analogue to modernity... it was some kind of good, moral, holy thing to do.

Who gave Harvey Weinstein a cattleman hat and a Senate seat?

Fucking Oklahoma, goddamnit.

Gotta keep your nethers soft as feathers =P